Yup, they trust Microsoft enough to power state of the art navy vessels, and I can only assume they've fixed the it-stop-dead-now feature of a few years back, and have fixed the last bug that could cause such problems. Or maybe now the ships just reboot faster.:)
A secret agent running around as a senior Microsoft programmer could cause reams of damage, for anyody interested in real power over Windows boxes-- e.g. any nefarious government, corporation, or super villan.
It should also be easier to subvert existing programmers, now that they can't retire in a year like they planned due to the stock nosedive.
Hi, flood devastated poverty stricken region N, here are your free rice supplies to keep you going, compliments of the friendly folks at GM.
However, I don't see many ways of forcing long-term adoption right now, given human cultures general stickiness to certain specific food types, however bad they might be for you...
NetBSD and more recently OpenBSD both support typcial Apple machines. FreeBSD is well bound to x86, so I don't expect a ppc port from them.
OpenBSD is a bit rusty still on the ppc, if the mailing list traffic about it I see go by is any indication. I have no idea how well NetBSD runs on ppc.
Golly, congress certainly is being "harmful to minors" and thus should be filtered out.
I really think we need an "Orwellian Clock" in the same way that we have a "Armageddon Clock" representing when the world nukes itself. The Orwellian Clock would represent how far humanity is from the ideals set forth in 1984; however, it would need some refinement of exactly who runs it, what causes moves on the clock, and so forth...
Obscure commands won't be known by John Doe researcher who grabbed the Debian box by accident at the bookstore.
Everything cannot be Debian, either for physical (vendor shipped RedHat Linux varient), emotional ("I Love my HP Pascal machine"), or mental reasons ("golly, this essential protein folding software only runs on Digital Unix 4.0A"). Not to mention political reasons, historical reasons, Debian machines that can't be upgraded due to some weird crappy complex thing someone wrote eons ago and has been running in a closet and everyone is scared to touch the macine because it basically works god knows how...
There are often delays between a vulnerability becoming known and the new package coming out, which leaves open univerity networks ripe for scanning, assuming everyone has automated updates installed and running properly. Believe me, I see a lot of linear port scans looking for ftp/rpc/SGI/whatever hacks go by daily...
And a fancy update system won't help you if, after installing Apache-latest with PHP-latest that some goober goes off and writes an insecure database interface to, say, your medical records (damn, damn, damn...). That's where prgrammer education comes in, from kernel assembly hackers to people playing with cute little Java Beans in a cliky IDE.
There are many problems with applying updates in a timely fashion, some of which include:
1) Sparsity of trained system administers who know how to properly secure a system and are paid to spend time tending to such problems. John Doe researcher who grabs RedHat Linux off the shelf in the University Book Store and installs it won't know / won't have the time to do this.
2) General insecurity of most unix distributions out of the box (hey look-- a car with keys in the ignition!), which leads to huge patch lists (e.g. Solaris, RedHat Linux) which need to be installed. Who installs the patches? See 1, above.
3) Custom hardware/software that requires a particular configuration or setup that makes upgrades hard or even impossible. A firewall in front of the problem machine might help, unless the particular design is on a webpage, in which case someone has to sort through reams of ancient code for security problems, hoping they don't screw up the current bailing-wire and duct-tape mess.
Solutions to the problem include more secure Operating System design, e.g. shipping with fewer open ports, keeping daemons up-to-date, auditing the code (e.g. OpenBSD), and programmer education to be aware of security issues and write code accordingly.
Also, automated update systems would be nice, but these generally don't come installed, or do and don't fit into the custom configurations the department might be doing with their unix machine.
The Superhero stories are among the great and most enduring American myths, an often unacknowledged part of this country's original and unique folklore.
Golly, I hope someone doesn't try to patent the superhero myth, as I think gilgamesh can claim prior art. Or Hercules (not the one on TV, damnit...), or the Yellow Emperor, or...
Granted, the U.S. does have a fixation with superheroes, it's just not original nor unique. Kinda like the pizza, invented elsewhere and honed to a fine art.
The problem with developing with an asp is that it sometimes comes back and bites you... somehow I don't think we'll see Cleopatra promoting Microsoft technologies...
Generally, all the people I've heard about who are running Exchange have a unix box running sendmail/whatever to translate messages between the internet and the exchange server. Some just run the unix box to move messages through, others run anti-virus/spam removal programs on the unix side. Last I checked on http://mail-abuse.org/, Exchange didn't even support dnsbl features...
The only reason to run Exchange is to take advantage of any "features" the management thinks they need, in which case you will just be another mailserver platform to your administrative costs.
Actually, a recent PBS/NPR special on the (failing) "war on drugs" stated that dealers can loose 90% of their product and still turn a profit... not a bad margin. And even if the U.S. was able to push dealers down into the 95% lose column (e.g. by nuking everything south of texas), dealers would just get more efficient.
Snapshots are a spiffy technology, but aren't the same as version control.
Version control would establish a history of revisions to a file, with logs and the ability to patch between various revisions, and so forth.
NetApp snapshots, on the other hand, require a section of the disk to be dedicated to storing recently changed files, and occur manually at the schedule set by the administrator-- two changes to a file inside the minimum snapshot period, and only the later change will get recorded.
However, you can get the snapshot period down quite low (e.g. every 10 minutes) soas to approach immediate "snapshotting" that a real version control system would allow
Mac OS X and NeXT machines seem to use a different algorithm to caluculate load averages, I've always been suprised when looking at the output of uptime or top on them...
Environment variables are definitly tainted to scripts; if you have a CGI that attempts to write to a filename whose location is based on DOCUMENT_ROOT, taint mode will stop the script.
HTML/JavaScript "Jammers" aren't useful except to speed up page loading; utilities exist (e.g. BBEdit on Mac OS) to format HTML/JavaScript all nice and pretty...
Apache was never designed for speed. If you want a fast web server, try:
http://www.zeus.co.uk/products/zeus3/
Expensive, though most likely less than the cost of W2K Server+IIS+other monopoly royalties. However, I haven't looked at NT prices for a while, so I wouldn't know for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, they trust Microsoft enough to power state of the art navy vessels, and I can only assume they've fixed the it-stop-dead-now feature of a few years back, and have fixed the last bug that could cause such problems. Or maybe now the ships just reboot faster. :)
A secret agent running around as a senior Microsoft programmer could cause reams of damage, for anyody interested in real power over Windows boxes-- e.g. any nefarious government, corporation, or super villan.
It should also be easier to subvert existing programmers, now that they can't retire in a year like they planned due to the stock nosedive.
Hi, flood devastated poverty stricken region N, here are your free rice supplies to keep you going, compliments of the friendly folks at GM.
However, I don't see many ways of forcing long-term adoption right now, given human cultures general stickiness to certain specific food types, however bad they might be for you...
Shakespeare has a great quote for people spending endless hours bickering over who he/she/it might or might not have really been:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
NetBSD and more recently OpenBSD both support typcial Apple machines. FreeBSD is well bound to x86, so I don't expect a ppc port from them.
OpenBSD is a bit rusty still on the ppc, if the mailing list traffic about it I see go by is any indication. I have no idea how well NetBSD runs on ppc.
That was mentioned in a wee little paragraph near the end of the "Web Page Address Harvesting" section, and included some simple sample CGI.
That idea, strangely enough, is all over ancient Taoist texts, that only someone who does not want to lead is qualified to lead.
Golly, congress certainly is being "harmful to minors" and thus should be filtered out.
I really think we need an "Orwellian Clock" in the same way that we have a "Armageddon Clock" representing when the world nukes itself. The Orwellian Clock would represent how far humanity is from the ideals set forth in 1984; however, it would need some refinement of exactly who runs it, what causes moves on the clock, and so forth...
Nuclear power arrived far too early for humanity to understand or respect, and the masses fear it as a protohuman would fire.
t it lepage.shtml
Read the story "Know Nukes" in the text "Minds, Machines, and Evolution" by James P. Hogan.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/mmande/baen99/
... or slashdot posts ...
Wasn't there some law fuss over email not being acountable past a certain period of time due to it's ephmeral nature?
I know my standard echo foo | lpr for printer tests won't go down in the history books, that's for sure...
Obscure commands won't be known by John Doe researcher who grabbed the Debian box by accident at the bookstore.
Everything cannot be Debian, either for physical (vendor shipped RedHat Linux varient), emotional ("I Love my HP Pascal machine"), or mental reasons ("golly, this essential protein folding software only runs on Digital Unix 4.0A"). Not to mention political reasons, historical reasons, Debian machines that can't be upgraded due to some weird crappy complex thing someone wrote eons ago and has been running in a closet and everyone is scared to touch the macine because it basically works god knows how...
There are often delays between a vulnerability becoming known and the new package coming out, which leaves open univerity networks ripe for scanning, assuming everyone has automated updates installed and running properly. Believe me, I see a lot of linear port scans looking for ftp/rpc/SGI/whatever hacks go by daily...
And a fancy update system won't help you if, after installing Apache-latest with PHP-latest that some goober goes off and writes an insecure database interface to, say, your medical records (damn, damn, damn...). That's where prgrammer education comes in, from kernel assembly hackers to people playing with cute little Java Beans in a cliky IDE.
There are many problems with applying updates in a timely fashion, some of which include:
1) Sparsity of trained system administers who know how to properly secure a system and are paid to spend time tending to such problems. John Doe researcher who grabs RedHat Linux off the shelf in the University Book Store and installs it won't know / won't have the time to do this.
2) General insecurity of most unix distributions out of the box (hey look-- a car with keys in the ignition!), which leads to huge patch lists (e.g. Solaris, RedHat Linux) which need to be installed. Who installs the patches? See 1, above.
3) Custom hardware/software that requires a particular configuration or setup that makes upgrades hard or even impossible. A firewall in front of the problem machine might help, unless the particular design is on a webpage, in which case someone has to sort through reams of ancient code for security problems, hoping they don't screw up the current bailing-wire and duct-tape mess.
Solutions to the problem include more secure Operating System design, e.g. shipping with fewer open ports, keeping daemons up-to-date, auditing the code (e.g. OpenBSD), and programmer education to be aware of security issues and write code accordingly.
Also, automated update systems would be nice, but these generally don't come installed, or do and don't fit into the custom configurations the department might be doing with their unix machine.
Golly, I hope someone doesn't try to patent the superhero myth, as I think gilgamesh can claim prior art. Or Hercules (not the one on TV, damnit...), or the Yellow Emperor, or...
Granted, the U.S. does have a fixation with superheroes, it's just not original nor unique. Kinda like the pizza, invented elsewhere and honed to a fine art.
The problem with developing with an asp is that it sometimes comes back and bites you... somehow I don't think we'll see Cleopatra promoting Microsoft technologies...
Of course carbon dating is wrong in this case-- it's half life is way to short to be relevant to 2.6 billion year old critters.
Creationists are mighty bitter about being upset after a few short millenium of stability, as a quick search for carbon dating on google revealed...
Curses! Spiffy bugs-from-space agrument foiled once again by Occam's Razor...
Generally, all the people I've heard about who are running Exchange have a unix box running sendmail/whatever to translate messages between the internet and the exchange server. Some just run the unix box to move messages through, others run anti-virus/spam removal programs on the unix side. Last I checked on http://mail-abuse.org/, Exchange didn't even support dnsbl features...
The only reason to run Exchange is to take advantage of any "features" the management thinks they need, in which case you will just be another mailserver platform to your administrative costs.
Actually, a recent PBS/NPR special on the (failing) "war on drugs" stated that dealers can loose 90% of their product and still turn a profit... not a bad margin. And even if the U.S. was able to push dealers down into the 95% lose column (e.g. by nuking everything south of texas), dealers would just get more efficient.
Snapshots are a spiffy technology, but aren't the same as version control.
Version control would establish a history of revisions to a file, with logs and the ability to patch between various revisions, and so forth.
NetApp snapshots, on the other hand, require a section of the disk to be dedicated to storing recently changed files, and occur manually at the schedule set by the administrator-- two changes to a file inside the minimum snapshot period, and only the later change will get recorded.
However, you can get the snapshot period down quite low (e.g. every 10 minutes) soas to approach immediate "snapshotting" that a real version control system would allow
Mac OS X and NeXT machines seem to use a different algorithm to caluculate load averages, I've always been suprised when looking at the output of uptime or top on them...
Environment variables are definitly tainted to scripts; if you have a CGI that attempts to write to a filename whose location is based on DOCUMENT_ROOT, taint mode will stop the script.
HTML/JavaScript "Jammers" aren't useful except to speed up page loading; utilities exist (e.g. BBEdit on Mac OS) to format HTML/JavaScript all nice and pretty...
Apache was never designed for speed. If you want a fast web server, try:
http://www.zeus.co.uk/products/zeus3/
Expensive, though most likely less than the cost of W2K Server+IIS+other monopoly royalties. However, I haven't looked at NT prices for a while, so I wouldn't know for sure.
It isn't over until the fat 'matrix sings?
(Sorry, have a fever, should be sleeping.)
Actually, most the the "haiku" I've seen here are senryu-- humorous or satiric poems dealing with human (well, computer :) affairs.
The best book I can think of to undo the damange done by the 5-7-5 haiku pundits is:
The Haiku Handbook - How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku
William J. Higginson (with Penny Harter)
Or a few related URL's:
http://empirezine.com/haiku/1.htm
http://www.ahapoetry.com/wildonji.htm
"...Backward compatibility is given a lot of priority..."
Perhaps OS-wise, but Microsoft has been quite good at forcing Office upgrades by breaking the default file format with each major release.